


Midgard Blues

by need_more_meta



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Asgard is Racist AF, Canon Divergence - Post-Avengers (2012), Canon Divergence - Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Hurt/Comfort, Internalized racism, Loki (Marvel) Feels, Loki (Marvel) Needs a Hug, Loki (Marvel)-centric, Loki needs all the hugs, M/M, Mentions of Interplanetary Racism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-24
Updated: 2020-06-24
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:22:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24896875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/need_more_meta/pseuds/need_more_meta
Summary: When the monster inside threatens to take over Loki, who better to offer comfort than someone else looking to escape a monster of his own?~~~He looks up at James, dizzy and hopeful and terrified.James’s voice is a rustle of the World Ash leaves. “C’mere.”Sweet merciful Norns, and the wise waters of Mimir’s well, and everyone who is in charge of anything in all the realms,Loki prays in the stretch of the second that he spends suspended between what he knows and what he wants,when you judge him, remember: he did everything he could.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Loki
Comments: 22
Kudos: 167





	Midgard Blues

**Author's Note:**

> Oh, look, someone spilled his Loki feels everywhere.
> 
> Huge thanks to [rainbow_nerds](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainbow_nerds/pseuds/rainbow_nerds) for proofreading this fic and giving me the courage to stop worrying and post it. <3

_It's the darkest hour_  
_of the darkest night_  
_It's a million miles_  
_from the morning light_

— **_Midnight Blues_** **, Gary Moore**

Ice.

It’s inside him. It’s outside him. It’s everywhere. It’s _him_.

It seeps and crawls and breaks through his skin, glazes over his eyes, burns in his throat, stiffens his fingers that claw at the air and grasp nothing.

It’s the power he never wanted, the inheritance he never asked for, the birthright he’d loathe to claim. It’s the truth he’s always sought, like a fool, like a petulant kid, a stubborn child who heeds no warning and then cries over a scraped knee while its parents purse their lips and shake their heads.

It’s a power he’s powerless against. An implacable force that tears through him, rending to shreds whatever he dared to think of himself, binding him motionless as he lies awake in a room designed not to feel like a prison.

A Midgardian kind of mercy — so noble and so deplorably useless. Don’t they know. Everything feels like a prison if you’re locked up with a monster.

Tears come and instantly freeze in his eyelashes, little crystals of his defeat. They catch the moonlight streaming through the high narrow window over his bed and shimmer in the darkness, cold in their beauty and horrible in their cold. A set of false diamonds; cheap and worthless, their purity ruined by flecks of red where they reflect the shame of his real eyes. Suitable trappings for a disgraced prince.

He wonders if the ice would let him lift his hand to wipe the crystals away, when someone knocks on his door.

Loki starts in his bed, a momentary spike of surprise cutting through the icy numbness. No one knocks on his door, not in this place. The only person to willingly visit him in this travesty of exile is Thor, and the golden heir of Asgard has always been above learning how to knock, except with his precious hammer. The Midgardians, no happier than he about the arrangement, prefer to stay away, giving him the widest berth possible. In a building born out of Stark’s grandiose architectural ambitions, the possibilities for avoidance are practically limitless.

The terms of Loki’s presence in the care and under the watch of the Earth’s mightiest heroes don’t prohibit him from venturing outside his designated chambers, as long as he stays in view of the building’s invisible guardian. It’s a privilege he seldom exercises. His wardens made a promise to Thor regarding Loki’s safety, and though they do an admirable job of refraining from outright hostility, their lack of finesse in concealing their emotions is lamentable. It bores Loki, the way this or that piece of Stark’s attire beeps or whirs whenever they happen to be in the same space. Or the way the good Captain’s fists clench, or the way the many-faced woman’s hands flit closer to her guns, or the way her sharp-eyed friend’s arrows keep burying themselves in the walls just behind Loki, purely by accident. The only thing to warrant a faint spark of excitement is the green beast, watching him from behind scholar's glasses.

And yet even the beast could not take out the monster.

The door creaks open and Loki remembers that he forgot to answer the knock. He thought he might have dreamt it, except that his dreams aren’t usually that specific. On those rare occasions when sleep graces his fretful mind, his nights explode in shards of colours, sharp enough to slice him to bits, and the scathing feeling of never being enough.

“There’s ice coming out of your room,” a voice reaches him from the door.

Shit. The ice has never spread quite so far before. The monster under his skin has been gaining strength.

Loki tries to focus on the dark silhouette outlined in the doorway. The voice is strange, in more ways than one. First, it’s unfamiliar, which should unsettle Loki but only leaves him mildly intrigued. Whatever this man brings with him, it cannot be worse than what Loki already has. Second, the voice is flat. Not entirely expressionless, just devoid of all the layers that Loki’s accustomed to.

“It’s kinda taking over the hall,” the stranger informs him, a simple observation, without a hint of annoyance or anger or fear, any of the things that Loki knows how to deal with.

What does this man want. Why is he neither furious nor afraid.

Loki attempts to sit up and finds that he cannot move his limbs. They’ve gone too rigid, too alien, more ice than him. There’s no point in fighting it. He ought to give up. Let the ice take over completely. It’s his nature, his destiny — all mapped and plotted long before he could have any say in it, so what’s the use in pretending otherwise. This is him, stripped of his feeble illusions, bare in his frigid reality, ready to freeze the entire world with him.

He is past saving. Thor should have brought him to Asgard to be tried and executed for treason, or at least surrendered him to the Midgardian rulers. They must have been so eager to pry him open and learn the secrets of alien excellence. Oh, how he would laugh at their fluster when all they found was filth. How he would rejoice if they found a way to stop the monster.

The silhouette in the doorway shifts. “You okay?”

The question is simple, but the tone is odd. There’s no accusation simmering behind the stranger’s words. No _what did you do now_ masked as concern, no _it’s your fault anyway_ passed off as sympathy, no _serves you right_ under the veneer of care. There’s no pity either. There’s no disgust. It’s a simple question, one Loki has heard addressed to him countless times, and yet he can’t remember when he last heard it asked like that.

Honest.

It stirs something in him, somewhere deep, deeper than the ice, and he answers in kind before he can stop himself. “No. No, I am not.”

Honesty tastes like sacrilege on his silver tongue. Every instinct he has cultivated to survive in the Asgardian court screams at him. What is he doing, what is he thinking, he doesn’t even know this man, who knocks on his door in the middle of the night and talks to him like he isn’t the most despicable creature in the whole Nine Realms.

“Mind if I come in?” The stranger takes a step forward, and something at his left side glimmers in the moonlight.

Metal. Moving like a part of a body, not wielded as a weapon.

“Sergeant Barnes,” Loki recognises. The good Captain’s taciturn companion, the one who blends with the shadows so well, he might as well be a shadow himself. No wonder Loki couldn’t identify his voice. Until just now, he wasn’t even sure the man could speak.

“James,” the Sergeant says, a curious tangle of uncertainty and resolve behind the name. “James’s okay.”

“James,” Loki repeats obligingly. A peculiar human, this one. Either he lacks the self-preservation to fear the unnatural frost creeping all around him, or he has seen worse and come out of it alive. Neither explains his absence of contempt towards Loki. Regardless, Loki sees no point in stopping him. He cranes his protesting neck toward James in a pointed nod. “You are already quite in, aren’t you?” The cold strips his voice of its grace, leaving only barb, but James takes the permission without any comment. The shadow starts moving slowly towards Loki, the ice crunching under its weight.

Mustering all the will he has left, Loki presses his hands into the bed and pushes himself up. The sheets creak under him, their ice-crusted creases sharp like blades. The padded headboard is a block of pure cold at his back, but he’s sitting upright, which is improvement enough. It would be indecorous to receive a visitor while flat on one’s back, wallowing in a pool of one’s sordid misery.

James stops at the foot of his bed and regards him carefully. “You look different,” he observes, that flat, inscrutable tone hitting Loki like a slap.

Ice bristles on Loki’s tongue. “My skin is blue,” he spits, clear and vicious. “You can say it.”

The expression on James’s face doesn’t change. “Hard to tell in this light,” he says blankly, and maybe it was unwise to get offended by a remark made by someone who hardly meant it as an insult, if only for the lack of knowledge. Still, Loki could have gone without the extra reminder. The burning ice spread over his skin is already making sure that Loki doesn’t forget his place. He throws his head back, resting it against the headboard and watching James through his frozen eyelashes. James keeps his hands in his pockets and his back is hunched, but his eyes shine in the darkness and their piercing honesty jolts something strange and forgotten in the God of Lies. “Does it hurt?”

“What?” Loki blurts out, both because he doesn’t understand the question and because he cannot believe this is the question James has decided to ask.

“Blue. What you said. Does it hurt?”

Loki almost laughs. Oh, but how delightful. This human truly doesn’t have the faintest idea of what sits before him. An ignorant mind can be so sweetly malleable. Loki could spin a heart-breaking tale, present himself as a victim of an evil curse, a casualty of a war waged by indifferent kings, a hapless hero serving his punishment for an age-old mistake until true love frees him from it. He could weave a story of an innocent child, scorned without a reason, driven to heinous deeds in its attempts to fix whatever it’s done to deserve that disdain, only to find out it was never a possibility.

Or he could tell this man the truth. “This is simply me,” he begins, cutting himself open with this new habit of honesty. “My, ah, true form. My natural state, if you will.” He wants to flash James a grin, but his face is frozen hard. “Now, how can someone’s natural state possibly hurt? That would be quite unnatural, wouldn’t it?”

“It can,” James says simply.

Loki’s chest splits and the crystals framing his eyes melt, hot tears sliding down his face, searing his cheeks, washing away the frozen crust at the corners of his mouth. He remembers, vaguely, this man’s story — what he has pieced together from the glimpses of conversations held when no one thought he was listening. He’s heard enough to know of the lies this man had been told, the past that had been ripped away from him, the home where he can never return.

Asgard or Midgard or Jötunheim, cruelty is universal, and so is pain.

James steps closer, his features sharp and serious in the moonlight. “Wanna talk about it?”

A question even more bizarre than the previous one. Loki folds his hands in his lap and keeps his voice steady. “I don’t think I have ever heard you talk before,” he deflects.

James shrugs. “Didn’t have much to say. Can I sit?” He nods at the ice-covered bed.

“I don’t think I have ever seen you come this close to another person,” Loki deflects again. It’s a game now, between the two of them, and for the first time in his life, Loki isn’t sure he understands the rules.

James does. He lowers himself onto the bed, his back a gush of heat just one lean away from Loki’s ice-bound legs. “Don’t trust people much.”

Loki’s eyebrows furrow, carving two grooves into his stone-cold forehead. “And you trust me?” 

“Yeah.”

James looks pale in the moonlight, but it’s a paleness of someone who tends to shy away from the light, not someone who’s freezing to death. He should be shivering, his teeth clattering, his eyes wide with horror. He should be backing away, not coming closer, seeing through Loki’s evasions, accepting them as the pleas Loki would never utter aloud.

“How?” Loki whispers, cursing himself for the quiver of hope in his voice, his muscles, the desperate pulsing thing underneath the ice.

“Like this.” James puts his flesh hand on Loki’s bed, palm up, fingers lax and slightly curved. An offer, an invitation.

Kindness.

The ice must be torture against his bare skin. He doesn’t seem to mind.

It’d be so easy. Shape the ice into a blade, drive it through this man’s chest, watch life drain from his little human form. Loki’s magic has been restrained, but the frost can take care both of the cameras and the body. Glamour is easy, even with the restraints. He could disguise himself as James, make it look like the vigilant Sergeant found an ice demon in Loki’s room and diligently dispatched the creature, pulverising it into a fine powder of bone and meat. How unfortunate. Thor would probably upgrade his style again, to showcase his mourning. Etch some snakes into his breastplate to go with the horned helmets on his vambraces. What an incredible honour.

The possibilities would be endless. He could stay among the Avengers as James for a while, get a taste of distance born out of respect instead of hatred. Make the good Captain squirm in his righteous tights. He could roam Midgard, maybe find himself another army. Humans are foolish, he’d think of something. He could return to Asgard and look Odin in the eye and stand tall when the King reads his sentence. That would be fun. Or he could explore a different realm, something new entirely. He could run and be something other than he is or was or was supposed to be. Find a place where he can be worthy.

It’d be so easy, really.

He looks at the hand lying open next to him. This is harder, infinitely so. This is a complete and utter impossibility.

It’s also the only thing Loki can do.

Gingerly, he lifts his right hand, holds it in a loose, wary fist over his thigh, almost drops it back. James doesn’t move. Swallowing around the icy spikes lining his throat, Loki uncurls his fingers, and his hand starts moving forward, closing the distance to James’s in a halting, stuttered glide, hovering above the frosted sheets. James’s eyes are steady on Loki, watching him with a patience, undiluted by exasperation. Suspecting nothing, demanding nothing. As if Loki is a wild animal, too damaged to be dangerous, and James is a benevolent soul coming to aid the poor wretch.

Or a cunning predator hunting its prey.

Loki’s fingers stop a hair’s breadth away from James’s. He should have realised sooner. Hasn’t he by now memorised the Tower inside and out, down to the last bottle in Stark’s secret bar. There’s no way James could have accidentally stumbled into his hallway. Loki narrows his eyes at him, the ice chilling his voice into a hiss. “What were you doing on my floor?” The question hangs frozen between them.

James’s jaw tightens and he glances away. Hiding. So unoriginal. “Couldn’t sleep,” he admits, which sounds truthful enough, but Loki sort of invented lies by omission and he knows one when he sees it. He waits for James to elaborate. It doesn’t take too long. “Went patrolling.”

Of course.

Loki drops his hand onto the bed, away from James. So much for the trust.

“Truly, James,” he begins silkily, stretching his lips until they cut into his cheeks, “there is no need.” He snatches his hand from the sheets and brings it to his chest. The frost from his fingers reaches through his shirt, stilling his frozen heart even further. Habitually, he feigns sincerity, even though what he’s saying is true. “Rest assured, despite my perfectly deserved reputation, I hatch no plans to harm any of the Tower residents, or visitors, or whomever it is you are so set on protecting.” Frankly, he’s too tired for scheming, and besides, there isn’t anything left to scheme for, not for him, not anymore. But that explanation is not for the mortal’s ears. “One can only get banished in so many realms,” he says instead. His smile is crooked, half because he intends it to, half because his lips are freezing over again.

James frowns. “I wasn’t protecting _them_ ,” he corrects, something sad and fierce in his emphasis. He looks angry when he turns back to Loki, though Loki isn’t sure that this anger is directed at him. “I’ve seen how they look at you.”

Like he’s a mad alien god with a colourful history of death and destruction, presumably. It would be wise for James to follow their example, not sit here with eyes full of fury at some imagined slights against a total stranger. “I don’t need protection,” Loki tells him, aiming for a scoff, but his voice catches on the last word. “I am a monster. I am _the_ monster.” It’s supposed to be a threat. It comes out as abdication.

The lines of James’s face shift, a ghost of a bitter twist to his mouth, a haunted hardening around his eyes. “You and me both.”

A mortal, a Midgardian, a mere human, what does he know. He should be cowering in awe or standing up in defiance, kneeling before the god or rising against the invader. Fleeing or fighting.

Anything but this.

“I am not what I seem to be,” Loki tries again, and he doesn’t know if he means Aesir or Jötunn or something else, just that the statement is true.

“Is anyone?” James counters. His hand is still lying open over the frozen sheets.

In all the times Loki has seen James slink through the common spaces of the Tower, he was almost fascinated by the way the man watched everything and everyone around him. Always alert and assessing, not quite the calculating scrutiny Loki himself has learned in the gilded halls of Asgard. More of a focused intensity, born on a battlefield, honed in captivity, sharpened to counter the ever blurring lines between danger and safety. A tight coil, poised to strike, ready to snap at the lightest touch.

Perhaps, that distance the Avengers keep putting between James and themselves is not as respectful as Loki thought.

He doesn’t know anything about this man, not really. Rumours, whispers, the stray debris of his tangled past. That, and what Loki sees right now, in the threadbare light of this incomprehensible night. The same, he realises, is true for James.

Would it be madness to believe, just this once.

Carefully, Loki places his hand over James’s, half expecting it to fall through. His fingers touch skin. It shocks him, the heat, the softness, the unbudging reality of it, clinging to his fingertips as he runs them along the lines on James’s palm.

The lines zigzag as James’s hand shivers under Loki’s. Belatedly, he remembers what a Frost Giant’s touch can do to Asgardian flesh. Horror rises in him at the thought of what it could do to a mortal, no matter how strong.

This is wrong. This is wrong, and Loki is a fool for believing for a second something could go right for him.

He tries to move away, but James wraps his hand around his, his thumb tracing the ridges on the ice-blue skin, the marks of a monster.

“James, no,” Loki pleads, panicked. He’d give anything to keep the contact, but there’s a reason children are taught to never ever touch a Frost Giant, except with the blades of their swords. High-pitched voices start chanting inside his head. _Jötunn trash, burns your flesh, stay away, or you’ll pay._ He can shut out the pesky rhyme, but he can’t deny its truth. “I’m going to hurt you.”

James’s thumb stops moving, but he doesn’t remove his hand. Loki searches his face, looking for a grimace, a wince, any sign of pain. He finds nothing, but his vision is swimming, and his blood is pounding in his ears, dark and viscous and unforgivable. He’s hurting this man, he knows he does, there simply isn’t any other way for him.

He feels warm impossible fingers wrap around his wrist. “Do you _want_ to hurt me?” James asks, like Loki has any say in this. Like what Loki wants is something that matters. Like he has a choice.

“I don’t control the cold,” Loki whispers, a terrible, humiliating confession. “It controls me.”

“Well.” James cocks his head and regards Loki thoughtfully instead of jerking away, storming out, and never coming anywhere near this room again. “I know a thing or two about cold. Scoot.”

“James, did you hear me? I—”

“I heard you,” James tells him, that flat tone of his taking on an uncompromising edge. It certainly doesn’t look like he did. He moves forward, smooth and fluid and stubborn like water. Before Loki can so much as stutter in protest, James is sitting next to him, side by side, warm and tangible and alive, incongruous amid the frozen desert of Loki’s bed. “This okay?”

“Are you insane?” Loki asks, aghast at both James and himself. He should scramble away, but James’s hand left his when James moved, and the longing for the lost contact is pinning Loki in place more firmly than any ice.

“You’re freezing,” James says, like it answers Loki’s question. He holds his left arm open, the metal resting on the headboard just above Loki’s head. Another invitation, and every cell in Loki’s body longs to accept it.

But it would be too selfish, even for him. It’s one thing to fight for what has been promised to him; it’s another to lay claim to something he has no right to. “James, I’m _doing_ the freezing,” he points out helplessly, willing this man to come to his senses and run away before the monster buries them both alive.

James hums noncommittally, a vibration that shakes the air between them. There’s no sarcasm or mockery when he asks, “Are you?”

Loki blinks at him. Could it be that James forgot why he knocked on Loki’s door in the first place? Loki has heard that James has troubles with recovering certain memories, but he thought it concerned the events long gone, not immediate history.

In response to Loki’s confusion, James sweeps his eyes pointedly around the room. Dumbly, Loki follows his gaze.

The ice that was crawling over the door has receded, reduced to a jagged circle shimmering just around the bed. The temperature in the room has increased, too, not by much, but enough to feel the difference.

The monster is relenting.

The monster is relenting, and Loki has no idea why.

He looks up at James, dizzy and hopeful and terrified.

James’s voice is a rustle of the World Ash leaves. “C’mere.”

 _Sweet merciful Norns, and the wise waters of Mimir’s well, and everyone who is in charge of anything in all the realms_ , Loki prays in the stretch of the second that he spends suspended between what he knows and what he wants, _when you judge him, remember: he did everything he could._

He crumples into James’s side, glacial hands clutching at the thin dark cloth of his shirt that cannot possibly protect his human body from alien cold. Not even Asgardian armour could do that, and it seems fitting enough that Loki’s first attempt at honesty should kill the man who has given him the chance.

He hears a soft whirr from above and metal fingers come to rest on his head, their delicate coolness unexpectedly soothing against the frost of his skin. James’s flesh hand settles on his shoulder, cradling his frame as he trembles against the body that should be collapsing under his touch.

“You good?” James asks, a rush against Loki’s hair.

James and his preposterous, unthinkable questions. What is Loki supposed to say to that. That he has never been good, that he has always been the troublesome one, the black sheep, the rotten apple in an otherwise perfect golden orchard.

When Loki says nothing, James glides his metal hand down, resting it across Loki’s back and pulling him closer. Loki’s knees knock against James’s, a flush of warmth that unlocks his limbs, and Loki curls into the embrace before he can think better of it or even think anything at all.

It’s not his mother’s touch, tender but restrained — burdened, as he knows now, with a secret she had been forced to keep. Nor is it Thor’s boorish grip, vigorous to the point of frustrating. It’s certainly nothing like Odin’s explosive remoteness. And whatever other contact Loki has scrounged over the centuries, he could never escape the subservience that pervades every interaction with a prince, no matter how intimate.

James strokes Loki’s back, traces patterns on Loki’s arm, and there are no meanings hidden behind that, no expectations, no history, no past. Only the night, the silence, and, maybe, an understanding.

The sheets under them begin to smooth as the ice thaws, leaving behind a faint dampness that evaporates quickly in the warming room. Loki presses into James, burrows into him, breathes him in: the sweat, the fire, the tang of metal and oil. Intoxicated, he turns porous, flowing out of himself, drifting, liquid and weightless, in the sureness of James’s arms. Through the haze, he feels James nuzzle his hair and take a deep breath.

A sudden terror seizes Loki, yanking him back into the hard shell of his treasonous body. _What looks like frozen shit, crumbles like dried shit, and stinks like shit warmed over?_ his brother’s voice rings in his head. _A Frost Giant_ , his own replies obediently. Playground talk, ruthless in its dogmatic naivety. He shakes his head to dislodge the unbidden memory. Of all the things to worry about.

That’s right. He should be worrying about hurting James, not being rejected by him. He can handle rejection; Norns know, he’s had enough practice. The other thing — that’s something he’d rather not find out. An hour ago he wouldn’t have cared, but time is a funny thing, even for gods.

He draws back, just enough to cast an anxious look at James. He’d withdraw further, but his willpower has its limits, and they are not on the altruistic side. James tilts his head at him, and his hands stop moving, resting lightly on Loki’s back.

“Too much?” James asks, in all seriousness, and Loki almost breaks at the sheer absurdity of the suggestion. He would claw his way into James’s body and stay there until the end of times if he could.

It’s probably for the best that he can’t.

He looks down at his hands, two pieces of nightmare, still splayed over James’s chest. The ice should have ripped his shirt apart, sucked out all the living warmth out of him, cracked his skin and destroyed his flesh. Instead, James’s chest rises and falls in an even rhythm under Loki’s palms.

“Why aren’t you…” He trails off, his throat clamping shut as the image of James broken by the monster invades his vision again.

“I don’t know,” James says, sounding sincerely mystified. He lifts his hand and curls his flesh fingers around Loki’s ridged forearm. Torn between wanting to snatch his noxious arm away and wishing James never let go, Loki stays completely still. James considers the places where their skins touch. “I’ve been frozen a lot,” he says, his forehead wrinkling as he watches himself remain unscathed by the alien taint. Something like an epiphany flits across his face, and he meets Loki’s eyes with the most genuine curiosity. “You think one can get immune to frostbite?”

How does this man’s mind work.

Loki is no expert on human physiology, or on Jötunn one, for that matter, but he knows enough to see how ridiculous this idea is. Ridiculous, and artless, and so James, or at least the James he has come to know in the last hour. To Loki, it’s the only James that matters.

James keeps looking at him, eyebrows furrowed in contemplation, mulling over the mystery at hand with such earnestness that the only thing Loki can think of is _charming_ , and that’s when he _does_ break.

It starts with a snicker, an awkward cross between an undignified snort and a shuddering breath. Then it keeps growing, bubbling longer and louder, until Loki’s shoulders are shaking, and his stomach hurts, and the last bits of ice fall off his face, displaced by the lines and dimples animating his skin. New tears well in his eyes, ones that make the world sparkle around the edges. The steel grip around his heart bursts open in a flash of light.

Loki falls back into James’s arms, which wind readily around him. He’s still laughing, and he wants to explain himself to James, tell him he isn’t laughing _at_ him, but all he can do is rub his forehead against James’s chest and hope he understands.

Considering how things have been going for them so far, the chances are high.

James props his chin on Loki’s head with a pensive hum. “Or maybe,” he muses, as Loki does his best to rein in his shudders lest he knocks James’s teeth out, “you just don’t really want to hurt me.”

What could have possibly given him away. “No,” Loki manages to get out between bursts of laughter, “I really don’t.”

“Told you,” James says, and Loki can _feel_ the smug smile spreading across James’s face.

The hysterical mirth begins to subside, and Loki thinks about this, about the monster and power and control, and he doesn’t notice when his laughter becomes sobs and the tears begin to spill, running down his face in a waterfall of truly cosmic proportions.

A millennium of rage and grief and unavenged bitterness streams out of him, soaking James’s clothes, dissipating into the warmth of his body, leaving behind a tentative emptiness to be filled with whatever Loki can think of. For now, he chooses air.

James holds him, rocking him, stroking, staying there, right there, flush against him, unflinching. The room grows and condenses around them, a tiny fragment of space that is theirs and theirs only. Insignificant in terms of the universe; the only place of any importance as far as Loki’s concerned.

He has come here in search of a world to rule. He never expected to find a place to be.

The machinery in James’s left arm purrs, as he uses it for comfort instead of the violence it must have been designed for. Loki presses his cheek to James’s chest and closes his eyes. He listens to the steady pulse under James’s shirt and matches his breath to it. There is a looseness in his muscles, a certain translucency in his skin, but it doesn’t feel like weakness.

It feels like peace.

James’s flesh hand brushes the strands of Loki’s hair away and traces the side of his face, fingertips stopping just under his chin. A shiver rushes through Loki that has nothing to do with the ice. It reaches all the way down, through all the layers and masks, straight to the place that existed before the monster, and Loki is surprised and grateful to find out that such a place exists.

He tips his head up, leaning his temple against James’s shoulder. The metal doesn’t make for a comfortable pillow, exactly, but the way James is looking at him more than compensates. There’s a calmness in his eyes, a confidence, an intensity unmarred by the apprehension that he usually carries with him wherever he goes. It baffles Loki, how this man must have watched him for months and decided that he, of all the Tower residents, was someone safe. He doesn’t want to question that decision, not right now. Not when James’s fingers tighten around his chin, not when James’s lips press together and his throat bobs as he swallows thickly in his own attempt at control.

A flare starts low in Loki’s belly, an incandescence all the more brighter for the ice that surrounds it. His body shakes at the sharp contrast of the temperatures battling within it. The monster lurks, lingering in the frigidness of his ribs and the stiffness of his legs, the slowness of his blood and the lethargy of his mind. But the monster doesn’t matter.

What matters is, Loki wants. Not with his mind, not even with his body; he wants with something that precedes the mental and stays long after the physical is gone.

And for once, he wants something that is offered to him, not something that is denied.

Greedily, he surges up, presses his lips, raw and tear-swollen, over James’s mouth, feels James’s lips tremble then part under his. Metal braces his back, nudging him closer, and flesh fingers cup the back of his head, twisting into his hair with a carefulness that makes Loki’s heart break into a thousand pieces and knit back together all at once. He bites on James’s lower lip, sucks it into his mouth, tasting, probing, wondering, amazed and humbled and halfway into delirious.

He has to break for air far sooner than he would like to. All the crying has left his nose hopelessly blocked, and he can’t avoid an excruciatingly long and frankly offensive sniffle. Such a brilliant way to ruin the moment. Loki ducks his head with an embarrassed giggle, lifting a hand to cover his face. “Ah, what an unseemly mess I am,” he mumbles into his palm.

James takes his hand and pulls it away from Loki’s face, fingers gentle around Loki’s. “You and me both,” he repeats, and there’s a new intimacy flickering behind the words this time, a shared truth that settles into a mild glow in the pit of Loki’s stomach.

This close, Loki can see the tangles and knots in James’s hair, the stubble a few days overdue for shaving, the circles under his eyes, the traces of the monsters that have been keeping James awake, sending him to patrol the safest building on Midgard on his own. Selfishly, Loki feels grateful to those monsters for bringing this man to his door. Reverently, he thanks the Norns that, apparently, he hasn’t been one of them.

“Loki?” James calls, peering closely at his skin. “I don’t think that’s blue.”

“No.” Loki allows himself a soft chuckle, and his breath doesn’t freeze before him. “No, it is not.”

He doesn’t need to check to know his skin is smooth again, a flawless false porcelain, the whitest lie of his life. The monster has retreated, rumbling ominously inside Loki’s spine, hiding, waiting for the next time Loki’s solitude drives away his consciousness.

It might not come as soon as the monster wants.

James presses his lips to Loki’s forehead, keeps them there for a long blissful moment, and Loki melts into the tenderness. A new feeling spreads over him, a scintillating tranquillity, wrapping him in a protective layer that tastes like worthiness when James touches his lips to the corner of Loki’s mouth. The sheets are soft and smooth under them, and Loki lets James slide them down until they are lying stretched out against each other, face to face, Loki’s hands curled into James’s shirt without fear.

This, Loki finds, is also something he wants.

James touches his forehead to Loki’s, and Loki can’t help the silly grin that takes over his face. “Sleep tight.”

Loki nestles into James’s arms and lets the warmth engulf him. “You too.”

That night he dreams that someone knocks on his door and calls his name. He comes up to open it, and there’s light on the other side, and the light shines on him.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is [retweetable](https://twitter.com/need_more_meta/status/1296156356035174400) and [rebloggable](https://need-more-meta.tumblr.com/post/621829738938466304/midgard-blues-needmoremeta-multifandom)!
> 
> If you see something you like, let me know! I'd love to hear what you think. :3
> 
> And come meet me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/need_more_meta) and/or [Tumblr](https://need-more-meta.tumblr.com/) where I flail about my fandom faves, flail about my fic writing, and flail about everything, really. <3


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